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Micro Reviews, 2026

Created: 2026-03-27 (14:36:00) — Modified: 2026-05-16 (12:12:00)
Status: in progress

It’s taken me too long to realise I will never have enough time in this life to write, draw, make games, and on top of that also write lengthy essays about every single book I’ve ever read. I’m trying this year, as a compromise, to at least write something about them. So: micro-reviews!

Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine

Brilliant and appalling. Jock McLeish, failed engineer, failed husband, rabid conservative and lonely masturbator is a revolting character, but Gray makes him uncomfortably empathetic, has us by the end believing, and hoping, he is capable of some form of redemption. All the same, this is a brutal book and the sadomasochistic fantasies are the least of it.

This book is really important to me (it’s bizarrely one of a constellation of works that convinced me I needed to transition, asap) but I’m good on rereading it for another decade.

David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism

Sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious—does every single term being deployed need a detailed explication of its etymological roots? But the terms are useful.

I don’t know enough art theory to compare this book against other approaches, but I do appreciate the attempt to develop a vocabulary for art that does not specifically privilege the western tradition. I probably will not reread this book again in full for a long time. I will be reading in it pretty much constantly.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

My favourite Oulipo works are these warm, lovely things so enjoyable to read, that I generally don’t notice whatever formal experimentation they’re up to. This is one of those books I have to read in short bursts. The cities are so beautifully, inventively described, and encapsulate so much about the way we inhabit, move through and otherwise experience urban space, that reading about more than a couple at a time is too much.

I’m constantly seeing my own thoughts and experiences bounced back in language more precise and evocative than I’ve ever managed to describe them, myself. One of my favourites is Fedora, a stone city with a museum of glass globes containing all the different forms the city could have taken:

The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so, the others, what is imagined as possible, and, a moment later, is possible no longer.

John Ashbery, Three Poems

Ashbery’s poetry gets frequently, and frustratingly, described as obscure. He’s not. His poetry is slippery and opaque, but that’s because it’s about slipperiness and opacity, about the way we circle around what we really want to say, or who we want to be, and rarely ever get there.

I bounced off Three Poems when I was young. Coming back in my late twenties was a revelation. They’re not the slightest bit obscure, they’re like Ashbery sat down across from me, addressed me and described in the clearest possible terms the circling, looping, evasive patterns of my own life. These three poems are some of the best writing, ever, easily, period.

John Crowley, Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Absolutely gorgeous. If anyone ever tells me again that language is an insufficient instrument, from here on, I’m pointing them to this book. Absolutely fucking gorgeous, maybe the best thing John Crowley has ever written. Dar Oakley, the first crow with a name of his own, is drawn into a cycle of death and rebirth across two millennia of human history. It maybe wears a little long, as Crowley’s books sometimes can, but it’s a masterpiece.

Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren, vol. 1

This is such a good opening to the series. Frieren, a long-loved elven mage, retraces the journey she undertook almost a century ago, encountering and remembering her former travelling companions. I’m fond of the autumnal tones with which this book starts and looking forward to seeing how later volumes develop Frieren as a character.

Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe, Frieren, vol. 2

Where the first volume spans almost a century, this one slows down to focus on a couple years’ journey north. I’m still curious to see how the series will handle the likelihood Frieren will outlive her new travelling companions, but do not mind that it is not being raised just yet.

This volume also introduces demons, described as wild beasts that can only mimic human speech and society. Much less interested in this. It’s still early days. I hope they develop into something more complex than inherently evil, token antagonists.

Leena Krohn, Tainaron: Mail from Another City

A woman moves to a city inhabited by talking insects, and writes letters her friend or former lover back across the ocean. I thought I would like this more, but for the most part the novel does not compellingly explore either the unfamiliarity of life in Tainaron, nor the narrator’s relationship with the silent recipient of her letters. It’s understated in a way that may benefit from a reread—I’m not sure, though, that I would get more out of it if I sat with it for longer.

Pamela Dean, Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary

Filled with the minutiae of its characters’ daily lives—schoolwork, conversations among friends, family squabbles, arguments on bulletin-board systems—which suggests more critical things happening just under the surface, on an emotional level. The same for the literary allusions: they are used less as clues and more to establish moods and resonances, so that when the novel does reach its conclusion it all makes an appalling sort of sense why its characters make the decisions they do.

It doesn’t pull all its loose threads together half as well as Tam Lin. But it is fantastic, eerie and puzzling.

Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Near-perfect. It is miraculous the way this book can inflect its humour with sadness, and its melancholic moments with lightness. I love that its characters often break into song. I love that feels it no obligation to give them an easy, happy ending. I love that it is about being loved for who you are and not what you do, that it pushes back against being a hero even as it is obsessed with, explores our need for heroic narratives.

Taiyo Matsumoto, Ping Pong Volume One

This left me cold. The setting is more grounded than Tekkonkinkreet’s Treasure Town, although the same frenetic energy of that book still comes through in the actual ping-pong sequences themselves.

I think part of the problem is that it quickly establishes what drives and gnaws at its characters, the way they relate to one another, but then doesn’t develop them much further. It’s oddly listless. I’m interested to see where volume two takes it from here.

Terry Pratchet, Wyrd Sisters

I avoided Discworld for years because so much of the stuff that claimed it as an influence was… not funny. I assumed that whatever they were imitating couldn’t be that good either. I’m a fucking idiot. Discworld is surreal and funny and wonderful and warm and bighearted. This one is a demented Macbeth parody, only the witches are the heroes and Shakespeare himself features as a dwarf haunted by visions of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. It’s so, so good.

Tove Jansson, Fair Play

God I love this book. It’s a set of interlinked short stories about a pair of elderly artists who live and work alongside one another, spend their summers on a remote island, travel, get lost at sea in the fog and get into fights about their parents. Not much happens but it somehow still encapsulates an entire philosophy of work and love.

The artists, Mari and Jonna, live at opposite ends of an apartment complex and visit by way of the attic, “a necessary, neutral interval between their domains.” What a dream.

Travis Baldree, Legends and Lattes

This is really, really good. I liked that it gets deep into the minutiae of what setting up a coffee shop in a Dungeons & Dragons kinda world would look like. Anyway why can’t there be fantasy books about people (or orcs, or succubi, or beastfolk) trying to start over, reinvent themselves and practice any craft other than stabbing fiends. Literary fiction is full of novels where nothing earth shattering happens, so why can’t fantasy do the same. Where’s my fantasy analogue to The Magic Mountain.

Ursula Le Guin, Malafrena

Set in the same fictional eastern European nation as Orsinian Tales, in the first half of the nineteenth century, filled with revolution and violence and unrequited love, suicide and imprisonment, but it’s an unexpectedly gentle book.

In Orsinian Tales it seems unlikely that any of the provisional escapes its characters achieve will ever hold out for long. Itale Sorde, for all the brutality he experiences, seems as though he may ultimately be OK. I’d love to write a big essay about Orsinia but I probably need to reread this and the stories again, first.

Ursula Le Guin, Orsinian Tales

Orsinia may be my favourite of Ursula Le Guin’s imaginary worlds, a country in which escape tends to be the only option, however provisional it ends up being. The glimmering thread throughout these stories is that even in a country as bleak as Orsinia, and even against the near-certainty that things will not work out, her characters still have the guts to make the attempt.

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